voiceless : the fund for animals - April 2005: Steven M. Wise

April 2005: Steven M. Wise

Steven M. Wise who has been described by USA Today as "America's best-known animal lawyer", began his practice of law in Boston in 1977. He was a founding member of the Animal Legal Defense Fund, which is an American organisation that works with prosecution and enforcement agencies to enforce animal protection legislation and to promote law reform. Steven was a member of the board of directors of the ALDF for fifteen years and served as its president for ten.

In 1995, Steven established the Center for the Expansion of Fundamental Rights, which seeks to use litigation and education to expand fundamental legal rights such as bodily integrity and bodily liberty to nonhuman animals, beginning with chimpanzees and bonobos.

In 2000, Steven became the first person to teach an animal law course at Harvard Law School. He has also served as an adjunct professor, teaching animal rights law at Vermont Law School, since 1990, and John Marshall Law School in Chicago. He is a frequent speaker at law schools, legal conferences and colleges throughout North America and Europe, including the University of Vienna Law School, University of Basel, Lincoln's Inn, London and the Office for Animal Rights in Florence.

In addition to teaching and practising animal law, Steven has authored two well-known books about animal rights law. The December 13, 2004 edition of Time magazine observed that "(o)nce the domain of activists, animal law has steadily gained respect among law schools and legal scholars since 2000, when Wise's first book, Rattling the Cage, provided an academic argument for granting legal rights to animals." His second book is Drawing the Line - Science and the Case for Animal Rights (Perseus Publishing 2002, US). He also contributed a chapter to Cass Sunstein and Martha Nussbaum's recent collection of essays entitled Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions (Oxford University Press, 2004). Earlier this year, Steven released his latest title, Though the Heavens May Fall - The Landmark Trial that Led to the End of Human Slavery (DeCapo Press, 2005).

Left to right: Rattling the Cage,
Though the Heavens May Fall - The Landmark Trial that Led to the End of Human Slavery, Drawing the Line - Science and the Case for Animal Rights.

Click on image for enlargement

Our Interview with Steven Wise

How did you become involved in animal law?

I was busy practicing plaintiff's personal injury and criminal defense law when I stumbled across Peter Singer's Animal Liberation in 1979. Marinated in the injustices of the Vietnam War, I had gone to law school to obtain skills to help work for social justice. Here was a social injustice, carefully documented, far and above anything I had ever imagined. This, I thought, was where I was needed most. Unfortunately, I was right.

What is the difference between animal rights law and animal law?

I have practiced animal law, more precisely, animal slave law for a quarter century. Nonhuman animals are property, legal things. The job of an animal protection lawyer is to protect the interests of nonhuman animals by maneuvering within a legal system in which nonhuman animals are invisible directly to the civil law. I teach and write about animal rights law, a discipline that does not exist, yet. In that future area of the law, at least some species of nonhuman animals will be legal persons with basic legal rights and lawyers will be litigating to protect these rights directly.

Why do you think the law classifies animals as property? To what extent do you think that can animals be protected (e.g. through litigation or legislation) within a system that classifies them as property?

The law classifies nonhuman animals as property because society wishes to exploit them to the fullest possible extent. Nonhuman animals cannot be protected to any significant degree so long as they are classified as property, since property exists for the use of persons. The most we can hope for is a softening of the foulest abuses.

Animal law has been described as the next great social justice movement. Do you believe that?

I don't know if it's next, but it's certainly waiting in line, and quite impatiently, too.

Your book, Drawing the Line, addressed the question of how the legal system should award certain legal rights to certain animals. Can you explain why in your view, such rights can not be sought for all species simultaneously?

Legal rights for nonhuman animals will occur most quickly by breaking though the legal wall that separates humans from every other animal and obtaining basic legal rights for any nonhuman animal, for that will decisively alter the debate for all. There are a million species of animals, human, chimpanzees, horses, moths, cockroaches, spiders, and many more, along a vast continuum of mental abilities, ranging from the barely sentient, even nonsentient, to the extraordinarily complex. Humans view these species along a similarly vast continuum, feeling close kinship to some, seeing others as pests. Our common law legal system is also firmly in place, carrying its own cherished values and principles, and generally operates conservatively, step-by-step.

Legal rights for nonhuman animals will be accomplished by presenting arguments that are the most consistent with our legal system's most fundamental values and principles. Our legal system will therefore be most receptive to legal rights for those nonhuman animal who most closely resemble us, who are the most intelligent and autonomous, and for whom we feel the most empathy and respect. Apes, dolphins, elephants, parrots, and perhaps dogs and cats are the best initial candidates. Rattling the Cage and Drawing the Line were meant to make these arguments and thereby obtain results as quickly as possible.

Your latest book Though the Heavens May Fall does not directly mention animals. Is it any way connected with your interest in the animal law movement?

Oh, Though the Heavens May Fall is drenched in nonhuman animals. The book is, as Darwin called his Origin of Species, "one long argument" about how a legal thing can successfully use the judicial system to obtain its personhood. The legal thing in question is James Somerset, an African slave then living in London. The book is the story of how those working on his behalf used the writ of habeas corpus to obtain his freedom and propel him from the legal status of thing to person. The participants in the trials and the public debates often expressly made the connections between human slaves and nonhuman animals who, after all, are also slaves.

Do you think the law mirrors the broader community's perceptions of animals and the nonhuman/human animal relationship? If so, how can lawyers go about achieving greater protection for animals?

Sometimes the law leads society, sometimes society leads the law. But roughly law mirrors, over the long run, the society it governs. That is why our work as lawyers is utterly dependent upon the work of the rest of the folks working to help nonhuman animals, to investigate the minds and behaviors of nonhuman animals, to educate society about who they really, and to agitate on their behalves.

Do you have any words of wisdom to share with Australia's budding animal lawyers?

The struggle to obtain basic legal rights for nonhuman animals involves social reform beyond anything that has ever been attempted. The economic, religious, political, legal, historical, psychological, and religious obstacles facing us are staggering. Be in this for the long run. Unceasingly continue to educate yourself. There is a tremendous amount to learn. Be patient, yet unholy persistent. Develop a coherent strategy. Do not allow yourself to become sidetracked. Be confident of the justice of your cause. Do not allow defeat to discourage you. If you are winning a lot, you're not trying hard enough. Construct a vast network of friends.

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